On my system, the WebP images take seconds to render, where the jpegs are near instant. This delay is even more noticeable on the last image of the tug boat. I know the memory/cpu trade-off laws, but is this trade-off worth it now? Will this format have to wait until people have better CPUs? They said they put the WebP images in a PNG container, is that affecting rendering speed?

No no, you're missing the point. People here only care about something being free if it gives them the chance to bash microsoft or apple. This would only give them oportunity to bash google, so it's inaplicable.

E.g., I remember one case from another board who was hearing differences in sound quality when playing MP3's off different hard drives in his computer. And no, he didn't mean the HDD's own noise. He was convinced that it's like on the old cassettes, where different kinds of tape (e.g., iron vs chrome) had different frequency responses. So it stood to reason to him that some HDD's have better bass than others.

It's a known fact* that electricity from hydro has a smoother, more natural sound than electricity from nuke plants. Coal is somewhere in the middle of the two.

I've heard people claim "Most people can't tell the difference between.01 and.05 THD, but I can." Which is like saying "Most people can't read the surgeon general's warning on a pack of cigarettes from a half mile away, but I can."

I dunno about you but I'm using a Monster(TM) brand DVI cable so I get superior native image resolution on my LCD and 11 bits of resolution per colour channel. I can clearly see the difference between the two formats and one of them is vastly superior.

There's already a better alternative to JPEG that's more advanced than WebP. Microsoft's HD Photo is now JPEG XR, and it's out there now. It's implemented in IE9, so there won't be any struggles to get Microsoft to adopt it. Yes there are patents on JPEG XR, but Microsoft is making the specification open and letting anybody implement it that wants to. There are no legal problems to implementing open source encoders and decoders for the format, so there's no reason except blind Microsoft hatred to not add JPEG XR support to every web browser and make it the new standard.